Tales in the Landscape: Preserving Island Heritage

Aim: We're creating a beautifully illustrated story-guide book with a young artist, preserving our islands' cultural heritage and lost stories.

Orkney tales, rooted in the land

Orcadian Tom Muir, MBE, with his wife and creative partner, Rhonda, is crafting an unusual, entertaining and culturally vital book. Together with talented young artist Hester Aspland, Tom and Rhonda are making and publishing Tales in the Landscape - a whimsical story-guide through the Orkney Mainland. 

Along with Tom's local stories, Tales in the Landscape will be amply graced with Hester's gorgeous illustrations, bringing the tales to life. Archive and full-color photos will further enhance this book that celebrates Orkney's storied landscape. 

Please read on to learn more about this project and how you can help us to make it come to life.

Following a trail of tales

Local stories and folklore reveal the depth and meaning of a place, grounding us in love of the land we stand upon. Nurturing a love for the land has never been more important. 

This book will provide a delightful trail of tales for readers to follow, whether curled up on a comfy couch at home or dreamily exploring Orkney's wilds, book in hand.

A living tradition

Many of Orkney's folk tales are known to have happened in a particular area: a hill, a farm, "that rock over there", a bay ... Tales in the Landscape features stories, local histories and old lore from every parish in the Orkney Mainland by location, as told by Orcadian writer, historian and traditional storyteller Tom Muir. 

Informed by Tom's long working life in Orkney's arts and museums sectors, this book will help preserve the precious intangible heritage of the Orkney Islands. (A future book will likewise treat the north and south isles.)

More than folk tales

Folk tales are only one kind of story. Tales in the Landscape will encompass a breadth of stories chosen from the long span of human history in the Orkney landscape. 

The islands are rich, for example, in stories from Orkneyinga Saga. Orkney's Viking and Medieval Norse periods will shine, through the combination of Hester's artwork and our photographs of these important places. 

Quieter, and no less important, reminiscences and anecdotes will feature in the book as well, lovingly drawn from one man's lifetime of tending Orkney's stories in all their facets.

You can sample a few more stories in the landscape of Orkney, as told by Tom, in this Youtube video, filmed during the 2020 Orkney Storytelling Festival, which Tom has been at the heart of since its inception in 2000.

Are stories important?

Why is Tom so passionate about passing on the virtues inherent in the old tales - virtues like kindness and compassion? 

Mirroring the experience of so many in earlier times, Tom was a badly dyslexic child who was bullied by both teachers and students and told he was stupid. He was relieved to drop out of school at age 14. 

One motivation for saving Orkney's stories

Because of his own early experiences, Tom delights in working with school children, especially when he can help break through learning barriers with the enchantment of storytelling – and how sweet it is that these stories come from the bairns' own islands. 

(Tom's family, at home on the farm of Valdigar - he's the little guy.)

Carrying it forward

Even though he's retiring from the Orkney Museum shortly, Tom will continue to make himself available to local schools, as he's done for many years, to collaborate on history and folklore-related projects with the children of the Mainland and north and south isles. 

There's no one better qualified to preserve these stories

January 2025 brought gratifying public recognition of Tom's work as Orkney's native storyteller, author, historian and folklorist. His MBE honours a decades-long (and primarily volunteer) passion to rescue treasures from the past and preserve the irreplaceable cultural legacy of Orkney's folk tales and lore.

What makes us think we can do this? 

Our confidence is based partly on the 27 years of unprecedented success for Tom's first book of Orkney folklore, The Mermaid Bride and other Orkney folk tales, which has been continuously in print since its original publication in 1998.

Mermaids and other supernatural folk

Years of experience since then has deepened Tom's understanding, and Tales in the Landscape will build on his previous creative work. Since Mermaid Bride was published, Tom has written and contributed to many more folklore and historical books, which you can read about on our website, Orkneyology.com. 

Orkneyology Press

With our own professional publishing house - Orkneyology Press - recently off to a pleasing start, we now have the ability to inexpensively and sustainably write, produce and distribute Tales in the Landscape. How handy is that! 

We sell our books through our online bookshop, and make them available through Amazon and other online sellers as well. 

We especially love to work with indie bookshops, both local and international. You can see our books here.

Building on a solid foundation

Through Orkneyology.com, Orkneyology Press and other free offerings online, we've been meeting some lovely, like-minded folk. 

Here's a bit more about what we've been creating - and why we feel certain we can make a fantastic addition to local history and lore with the publication of this book.

The Orkney Folklore Trail app

We volunteered in 2018 to join a project headed by a team from Robert Gordon University, testing a gps-based tourism app in Orkney, featuring stories, photos, music and practical travel tips for ten locations in the West Mainland. 

(Naturally, we had to stop in to Orkney Antiques while working in Birsay!)

The idea for this app is similar to what we're planning for the book: telling stories of the land and its people in the landscape. You can access the Orkney Folklore Trail app online, or download it and take it with you and listen while you explore the Orkney landscape.

Orkney Folklore Trail app is available to download free on Orkneyology.com.

Tales for Troubled Times 

Tom originally recorded the almost 200 audio tales on our website during the first lockdown, as a gift for our friends who were isolated and suffering from depression. Each night he'd sit upstairs in the guest room and record a couple of new stories on a tiny recorder surrounded by a sound box of pillows. 

We got a lot of thankful comments on Facebook. Later, when we thought we might take the stories down, people wouldn't hear of it. So we've left them on the website as a kind of sound archive of that weird time. You can listen to Tales for Troubled Times here. 

Nurturing new storytellers

Tom always keeps room in his life to mentor, without charge, the occasional new storyteller, such as Icelander Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson, mentioned at the end of this page, simply because it's the right thing to do.

Hjörleifur, Rhonda and Tom at the wonderful Cape Clear Storytelling Festival, Ireland (photo by Liz Weir)

Orkneyology Podcast ~ Ower wi' the Moon

Everything we're doing under our Orkneyology "umbrella" works to promote Orkney and Scotland, folk stories, books, music, history and culture. We're going from strength to strength, finding new ways to promote and preserve the unique history of this part of the world.

Listen to our Ower wi' the Moon podcast here.

And then one day ... we found Hester!

We literally gasped when we first saw Hester's work in a little booklet given to us by a friend.

Everything Hester does is old-style breathtaking illustration. Think Arthur Rackham and John Bauer. You can see more of her work on her website.

Plans are in the works

You can see why we're desperate to work with Hester. Thankfully, she's eager to work with us, too. 

Our aim for this campaign is to enable this excessively talented young artist, who is just starting out in her independent career, to illustrate Tales in the Landscape with as many of her fantastic creatures and landscapes as she cares to come up with.

On her website, Hester says this about her work: 

"My interest in traditional stories was born from a feeling of disconnection with the land around me and partly as a reaction to the climate crisis. I believe that we can strengthen our connection with nature through the exploration of folklore and land enchantment; continuing to build on folklore as a living tradition."

Hester graduated Edinburgh University in 2023 with First-class Honours in Fine Art. (No surprise there.)

How Tales in the Landscape can happen

The funds we're raising here are specifically to enable us to pay Hester fairly for her work, according to the rates she's asking, and make this book what it deserves to be - a sheer work of art that simultaneously preserves and promotes Orkney's endangered heritage. 

With any extra funds, we'll commission additional artwork from Hester for Tales in the Landscape, which couldn't otherwise be included due to financial constraints. Anything raised beyond that, we'll save to pay Hester for her artwork during our next collaboration. 

Icelandic folklore and customs by an Icelandic storyteller, anyone? Yes, this is happening too, in collaboration with Hester and Tom's "pet Viking", Hjörleifur Helgi Stefánsson, who Tom mentored over 20 years ago. 

But that's another story for another time ...

 Hester's Icelandic troll

And if you've stuck with us this far ...

 ... thank you! Please join us on this journey of the imagination. And if you're not living in the Orkney Islands, we hope one day you'll visit, with book in hand.